Archive for the ‘streamliner’ tag

The restored Dymaxion #2 returns to the National Automobile Museum. Photo courtesy National Automobile Museum.

Architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller had a dream of creating a better world, one in which quality housing was affordable to all, and transportation was safe and efficient. Though his Dymaxion concept (a portmanteau of sorts of “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion”) would eventually be applied to everything from housing through world maps and even his personal journal (or Dymaxion Chronofile), it is perhaps best known for its association with a vehicle, the Dymaxion 4D Transport, that Fuller believed foretold the future of transportation.

To be clear, the Dymaxion 4D Transport was never intended to be a mere automobile, and Fuller showed his distaste when the press referred to his invention as the “Dymaxion car.” In Fuller’s vision, the Dymaxion Transport would eventually be equipped with wings, giving owners efficient, safe, and practical multi-modal transportation. At the Dymaxion 4D’s inception, however, the technology to build a flying car (particularly one with inflatable wings) didn’t exist, so the compromise was to construct a road-going vehicle until science caught up with Fuller’s vision of the future.

The history of the Dymaxion 4D Transport has been clouded by time, and conflicting details on the car’s evolution and history abound. Fuller began sketching the concept, in flying vehicle form, as early as 1927, and in 1932 asked his friend, artist Isamu Noguchi, to prepare more formal drawings. Some say that funding for the Dymaxion project came from another of Fuller’s friends, socialite Anna Biddle, while other sources insist it was former stockbroker Phillip Pearson (who’d had the foresight to pull out of the market before the October 1929 Wall Street crash) that provided startup capital for the project. It’s likely that both contributed funding at one time or another, and in March 1933 Fuller rented the former Locomobile factory in Bridgeport, Connecticut, to begin assembling automobiles. To oversee the operation, Fuller hired engineer Starling Burgess, a man who had already achieved a great deal of success as the designer of the America’s Cup J Class sloops Enterprise and Rainbow.

On July 12, 1933, the Dymaxion 4D Transport made its public debut, and Fuller wasted no time in demonstrating the vehicle’s unique properties. Power came from a flathead Ford V-8 located in the rear, but driving the front wheels. Not counting the ash wood frame that carried the vehicle’s aluminum panels, the Dymaxion 4D used two separate steel frames, one to carry the engine, transmission, and driveshaft and a second to support the weight of the body. These steel frames were hinged together near the front wheels (see the March 18, 2007, SIA Flashback for a cutaway diagram), and the basic frame used no suspension, while the frame that supported the body used springs without dampers. The single rear wheel, which provided the steering, used a combination spring and damper setup. The benefit of such a design was that the Dymaxion could be driven on a rough road with little discomfort to passengers; the drawback, exacerbated by the vehicle’s cab-forward seating and center of gravity forward of the midpoint, was that the rear wheel occasionally had difficulty maintaining contact with the ground.

The ash wood frame used to support the aluminum skin. Photo courtesy Crosthwaite and Gardiner.

At low speeds, the Dymaxion 4D was extremely maneuverable, as the rear wheel could pivot up to 90 degrees. Parking, even in tight spots, was as simple as pulling the nose to the curb, pivoting the rear wheel and pulling the rear of the vehicle into the spot. The first example was said to be extremely lightweight (under 2,300 pounds), and despite its 11-passenger capacity and 20-foot length, still returned a claimed 22 MPG with a full load or up to 30 MPG with a partial load. This was aided by the vehicle’s aerodynamic shape, and Fuller claimed an unproven top speed of 120 MPH. At speeds above 75 MPH, the V-shaped undercarriage reportedly had a propensity to generate lift, particularly in the rear of the Dymaxion, making such a claim unlikely.

The Dymaxion 4D proved to be a sensation when it was shown in the Century of Progress exhibition at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. Orders for the unconventional people mover began to trickle in, and the first one built was reportedly sold to Al Williams and the Gulf Refining Company for use in promoting its aviation fuels. A second Dymaxion, ordered by a group of British motoring enthusiasts, was under construction, while a third was in the planning stages. Investors – some reports include automaker Chrysler on this list – began to take a closer look at the 4D Company. On October 18, 1933, Fuller filed a patent application for the Dymaxion 4D Transport with the U.S. Patent Office, and it began to look like his vision for the future of transportation may be realized.

That changed on October 27, 1933. With race car driver Francis T. Turner at the wheel, the Dymaxion was involved in a highly publicized rollover accident that was immediately attributed to the car’s unconventional “reverse tricycle” design. Turner was killed in the crash while passengers Colonel William Francis Forbes-Sempill and Charles Dolfuss (the Air Minister of France) were seriously injured. A later inquiry would show that the real cause of the impact was a collision with another vehicle (driven by a Chicago politician who wanted a closer look at the Dymaxion), which immediately fled the scene, but the damage was done. Flooded by negative publicity, Fuller and the 4D Company began losing both potential customers and potential investors.

The rear steering mechanism. Photo courtesy Crosthwaite and Gardiner.

Dymaxion 4D number two was completed in January 1934, but by then its original British buyers had canceled their order, and the car was later sold to a group of 4D Company mechanics. A third Dymaxion 4D, this one with a prominent vertical fin (reportedly added to the design to improve airflow and handling) was constructed, but by then the funding from investors had dried up, and Fuller reportedly spent the bulk of his family inheritance in building the car. It was eventually sold to conductor Leopold Stokowski (who would later use the car to promote war bond sales in Brooklyn, New York), but not before Fuller made a few last-ditch attempts at promoting the Dymaxion 4D.

Fuller booked a prominent space at the 1934 New York Auto Show, but pressure from Chrysler prompted the show to cancel Fuller’s order. Instead, the designer parked the car in front of the show’s main entrance, drawing perhaps even bigger crowds than the new Chrysler Airflow displayed inside. He’d return to the Chicago Word’s Fair with the Dymaxion in 1934 as well, and while the car received ample attention from the public and period celebrities, neither sales nor investors materialized.

Recreation of Dymaxion No. 3, built by Crosthwaite and Gardiner. Photo by Supermac1961.

Of the three original Dymaxion 4D Transports built, only number two survives today, in the permanent collection of the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada, following its 2009 restoration by British specialists Crosthwaite and Gardiner. The first was destroyed in a garage fire in Washington, D.C., in 1943, while the third was reportedly cut up for scrap during the Korean War. At least two faithful (or semi-faithful) replicas have been built.

The Dymaxion was never a commercial success, but it did foretell a future where efficiency was favored over style, and practicality was the biggest virtue. Rear steering mechanisms (supplemental to the primary front steering) did emerge on cars to improve handling, while front-wheel drive (though with a frontal engine placement) is now the industry standard. And much like the Stout Scarab, the Dymaxion’s use of interior space foretold the minivan and other such people movers that came along decades later.

In a way, its rear-steer three-wheeler configuration also proved influential as well: Due to the accident and the negative publicity, few carbuilders – whether professional or amateur – have attempted to build such a car since then.

For a guy who’s famously taciturn, Kent Fuller is one of the most powerful thinkers in the world of drag racing and land speed competition. He built his first dragster in 1956, and soon revolutionized that category by pioneering the horizontal-loop three-point roll bar, which obsoleted the earlier “skidbar” configuration favored by the likes of Scotty Fenn. That started a journey that led Fuller to a collaboration with Tommy Ivo, the discovery of Don Prudhomme, and his chassis as the basis for the most dominant Top Fuel dragster in history, the Greer-Black-Prudhomme dragster.

Since then, Fuller went on to design the radical Magicar dragster of 1963, a frame-within-a-frame innovation that allowed the driveline to be suspended. Later, he went into business building Volkswagen-based replica hot rods. At 79, he’s still at it. Fuller’s last stand, assisted by 14-year-old grandson Greg, is to build a new Bonneville streamliner with an even newer method of financing it: Fuller is using social media to fund the car via Kickstarter, an online funding platform that has seen more than 3.9 million people pledge more than $591 million, funding more than 40,000 creative projects ranging from books and film to technology, since its launch in 2009. The practice is known as crowdfunding, and Kickerstarter says Fuller’s LSR project will be the world’s first crowdfunded competition vehicle. Spec-wise, the Fuller car is a radical monocoque streamliner, designed so the pilot, ex-Indy Lights driver Andy Davis, will have to lie flat, his only view of the course coming via the mirrors on a periscope. Using an unblown flathead on nitro, the team aims to topple the current SCTA XF/FS record at 280 MPH and change.

After a while in this job, you get to feeling like you’ve seen it all. The chain emails that show the car you researched years ago. The all-too-familiar names, places and events that populate every story you write. In recent months I got to thinking I’d come across just about every homebuilt streamliner from the 1930s, until I came across the above image that yellerspirit posted to the H.A.M.B., originally from the Maine Memory Network and the Lubec Historical Society. Unfortunately, there’s not much context to go with the photo. It shows Lubec residents Gene Rier and Bud McCaslin in front of Rier’s garage in 1935 with the car they built the year prior. No word on the materials or components that went into the car, nor of the car’s ultimate fate.

The best we could do with some limited research was come up with a little more on Rier. Born James E. Rier in 1914 (making him about 15 when he and McCaslin built the car), he enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1940 and married Louise A. Johnson of Portland, Maine, in 1943. They lived in Newburgh, New York, where Rier was stationed, until 1946, when they returned to Maine and Rier opened an auto dealership, Rier Motors in Machias. Rier died in 1997 and his wife died 10 years later.

McCaslin remains as much a mystery as the car itself, though those wheels appear to be mid- to late 1920s Chevrolet wheels. Anybody out there able to fill in the blanks on this unique streamliner?

These three photos recently showed up in our inbox courtesy Charles Beesley, he of the excellent Reservatory.net. As Charles noted, they depict the famous Kenz and Leslie 777 twin-engine streamliner at Bonneville in 1950, the year that driver Willie Young pushed the streamliner past 200 MPH. Charles wrote:

Bill Kenz founded a Ford V8 specialty shop in Denver, Colorado with Roy Leslie in 1938, the pair having raced midgets together before that. Kenz’s first dry lakes burner was a ’31 Model A pickup with Edelbrock equipped flathead V8s at either end, the rear mill bolted directly to a quick change rear end with swing axles and torsion bars. The ungainly Odd Rod confounded skeptics by turning 140 mph at the first Bonneville National Speed Trials in 1949. Suitably encouraged, Kenz spent the next year building a more refined version of the concept – the flatheads now snug in a custom steel tube bridge frame beneath a smooth aluminum shell pierced only for intake and exhaust and the driver’s head. With Willie Young at the wheel, the ice blue 777 streamliner became the first hot rod to break the 200 mph barrier at Bonneville in 1950. A 255 mph run in 1952 made Young the first American to exceed 250 mph on land. With sponsorship from the Rocky Mountain Ford Dealers Association, Floyd Clymer, Wynn’s Friction Proofing and Bob Jones Skyland Ford, 777 ran well into the fifties, eventually with a third V8 where the cockpit had been, hanging the driver off the back, slingshot dragster style. The machine was finally retired in 1957 after posting a trap speed of over 270 mph.

The streamliner does still exist today, housed in a museum in Denver.

By the way, if you went on over to the Fran Hernandez Facebook page we linked to the other day, you’d likely have run across the below photo of another Kenz and Leslie 777, this one a Mercury Comet set up for drag racing in 1966. As with Hernandez, somebody needs to compile a biography of the Kenz and Leslie partnership.

* The greatest thing about land-speed racing, especially in the 1950s, was that there were no formulas. It’s you, your imagination, and some sort of engine versus the wind. Alan Richards decided to go as lightweight as possible, with as little rolling resistance as possible, and thus came up with this Garelli-powered streamliner that hit 55.62 MPH. ze Last Chance Garage has more.

*The Minutia Blog is always good for an obscure microcar or two, such as theÂ Hungarian Pajtas (Buddy), which featured gullwing doors and all sorts of visibility. Which may or may not be a good thing.

* Look closely at the above toy Microbus and, without clicking through to Big Blue’s Online Carburetor blog, tell us what it does. Hint: It’s not a transistor radio.

*Was it really such a different time in the 1930s when a magazine can write “It’s a safe bet to say that at one time or another practically every man in America has built himself a home-made vehicle embodying his own ideas in automotive construction.” One has to wonder, then, how many submissions Modern Mechanics and Inventions received for their announced contest for home-built baby autos.

“We’re definitely into streamliners here at the museum – we have a Tatra T87 and a McQuay-Norris – and I’ve always been interested in the Dymaxion,” Jeff said. “We got going on it gung-ho when we started it about two years ago, and we actually have a running, functioning chassis without a body now. The economyÂ has put the project on hold for the last six months, but we still hope to have it done by spring of 2011.”

Unlike Crosthwaite and Gardiner’s projects, Jeff has been plugging away at it without any hard deadlines, which has allowed him the freedom to tinker with Buckminster Fuller’s design and create an amalgam of the various versions of the Dymaxion with his own slight modifications.

“We talked about keeping the steering by cable, but to turn the car, that would’ve meant 25 full turns of the steering wheel. Our chassis guy said that would be suicide, so we changed the steering to hydraulic. That was the only major change we made; everything else, we tried to pick the best of what Bucky did.”

Fifty years ago, Donald Healey took two cars to the Bonneville Salt Flats in an assault on the record books. In two days, an international group of enthusiasts will recreate that event during the World of Speed events with recreations of those two cars, the Endurance Car and the Streamliner.

We’ve mentioned the Healeys Return to Bonneville Challenge in our Hemmings E-Weekly and in the pages of Sports & Exotic Car, which is what led Clayton Merchant to get in touch. As it turns out, Clayton’s friend John Progress is a member of the Bonneville, Utah, Austin-Healey Club, and John had offered to put the team up in his house, and the cars in his garage. John called Clayton over to take a look, and Clayton sent us these photos.

“John volunteered his pasture for parking and had plenty of room for the group to stay in his house,” Clayton said. “As he told me, he had only expected to have the cars trailered on his lot, he didn’t even know if he’d be able to see them, but before the next 2 days were done, they were doing a bunch of final work on both cars in his garage with his help. John is a former engineer and does fantastic work. Anyway, I just got off the phone with him and they are still fine tuning this morning as well as working on the tow bar, parachute and other small details.”

The silver car is a replica of the supercharged Streamliner, which Donald Healey drove to 192.74 mph.

The green car is a replica of the Endurance Car. Steve Marsh of Marsh Classic Restorations in Australia constructed the cars, using many parts from the original cars.

Racing is expected to take place September 16-19. You can follow the Healeys Return to Bonneville Challenge through its own blog.

Longtime blog readers will recognize the car in the above photo as the Ralph Schenck streamliner, which I profiled back in December 2006. It’s a unique car that doesn’t garner as much attention as some other early dry lakes racers, but like those other early dry lakes racers, Strother MacMinn turned his camera on it and grabbed this photo of the streamliner at the January 1948 Hot Rod Exposition at the Los Angeles Armory.

Only thing is, Strother never developed the film before he died in January 1998. That task was left to Robert Ames, who bought several cansiters of undeveloped film from Strother’s estate a year later and who compiled some of the best of those photos in the book he and Ken Gross recently released, “Hot Rods and Custom Cars – Los Angeles and the Dry Lakes: The Early Years.” The placard in the photo reads “Heinrich & Seaton / Competition Streamliners / Mercury engine,” and the ‘liner still wears the nose Ralph Schenck put on it (rather than the tube-grille nose Heinrich and Seaton put on it, shown in the earlier post), so we now know Heinrich and Seaton made their modifications in 1948, either before or during the race season.

If you happen to be in the Phoenix area this weekend, this exhibition is a can’t miss for both car and automotive design enthusiasts. More information is available on the Phoenix Art Museum website at this link http://www.phxart.org/exhibitions/curves.asp